Microsoft, Google Employees Get Punchy Over Blind Search Test

Microsoft's re-branded search engine Bing (and the $80 million ad campaign to promote it) may turn out to be a big bust in the end, but at least for now the whole thing is turning up the heat among three vicious rivals in the search engine wars.

Over the weekend there appeared a site called Blind Search that lets users compare search results from Microsoft's Bing, Google and Yahoo and then vote on the most accurate.

Early on -- after 793 tests -- a plurality of users actually prefered Bing results -- 38% voting for Bing, 36% for Google, 25% for Yahoo. But by about 7,000 votes in Google had taken the lead, 46% to Bing's 34% to Yahoo's 20%. Then, as the weekend closed, Yahoo surged into the lead with 45% of the vote. Now poll results are closed.

What's going on here? A little pushing and shoving from Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo employees is what.

Some fun facts:

Blind Search was built by a Microsoft employee named Michael Kordahi. So maybe there's some bias in the early results due to whomever he sent the poll to her first.

We only know Blind Search was built by a Microsoft employee because Google employee Matt Cutts weighed in on the early results, publicly worrying "a little bit about self-selection bias."

Finally, the reason Michael Kordahi says he removed Blind Search's poll results from public viewing was because "some douche [was] gaming the system." He doesn't mention that he also removed the results just as Yahoo was taking the lead (unfairly or not).